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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on April 28, 2009
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2009 4(3):268-277; doi:10.1093/scan/nsp014
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© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Emotional attention in acquired prosopagnosia

Marius V. Peelen1,2,3, Nadia Lucas2, Eugene Mayer4 and Patrik Vuilleumier1,2,4

1Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland, 2Laboratory for Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Department of Neurosciences, University Medical Center, Geneva, Switzerland, 3Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Green Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA and 4Department of Neurology, Geneva University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland

The present study investigated whether emotionally expressive faces guide attention and modulate fMRI activity in fusiform gyrus in acquired prosopagnosia. Patient PS, a pure case of acquired prosopagnosia with intact right middle fusiform gyrus, performed two behavioral experiments and a functional imaging experiment to address these questions. In a visual search task involving face stimuli, PS was faster to select the target face when it was expressing fear or happiness as compared to when it was emotionally neutral. In a change detection task, PS detected significantly more changes when the changed face was fearful as compared to when it was neutral. Finally, an fMRI experiment showed enhanced activation to emotionally expressive faces and bodies in right fusiform gyrus. In addition, PS showed normal body-selective activation in right fusiform gyrus, partially overlapping the fusiform face area. Together these behavioral and neuroimaging results show that attention was preferentially allocated to emotional faces in patient PS, as observed in healthy subjects. We conclude that systems involved in the emotional guidance of attention by facial expression can function normally in acquired prosopagnosia, and can thus be dissociated from systems involved in face identification.

Keywords: prosopagnosia; emotion; face processing; FFA; FBA; attentional capture

Correspondence should be addressed to Marius Peelen, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Green Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. E-mail: mpeelen{at}princeton.edu

Received November 22, 2008. Accepted March 24, 2009.


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[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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